Excerpt

Prologue:
The Dark Century

In the spring of 1945, with much of London in rubble, Francis Bacon exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The painter must be a “wild man,” thought the critic John Russell, to loose such monsters upon the world. It was not their darkness per se that alarmed him. Who in 1945 did not despair? It was their peculiar darkness that was troubling. The vulturous figures were gleeful, artless, and grotesque. They all but smacked their lips. And the orange background was vile. The Lefevre Gallery in Mayfair was exhibiting them in a group show beside the work of England’s two most admired living artists, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, both of whom made art that sensitively expressed “the terrible toll of war.” The show was attracting large crowds; the gallery reprinted the catalog three times. But the people who stepped into the gallery hardly had time for the respectable Moores and Sutherlands, not with these gloating ghouls to their left. They flinched “in total consternation.” So “shocked” was the writer for Apollo Magazine that he felt “glad to escape.” The colors made him think of “entrails, of an anatomy or a vivisection.”

A theatrical entrance. Who was this new wild man?, Russell wondered. In what skull-dressed cave was he to be found? The critic was astonished to discover a well-born gentleman — handsome, witty, and amiable — living in an elegant town house a few minutes’ stroll from the Victoria and Albert Museum. He had perfect manners when he chose, but also a laugh that — said a friend — “sounded like a Highland cock on heat.” It soon became clear to Russell and others that this charming man was intent upon mercilessly attacking every comforting platitude of the twentieth century. And not just from the safe space of his studio. Four years after the Lefevre exhibit, Francis Bacon upstaged Princess Margaret at a white-tie ball just as she began to warble the Cole Porter song “Let’s Do It,” booing her to the wings as if she were a music-hall extra. Later, he drew himself up like a Victorian moralist and comically insisted that he was merely upholding the standards of the community. “Her singing was really too awful,” he said. “I don’t think people should perform if they can’t do it properly.”

Perform properly. Bacon was a man preternaturally attuned to the social stage. Proper form was no longer obvious midway through the century, not after the butcher’s bill from two wars, and he took a demonic delight in the upended performance and the torn-away mask. He was creating two revelatory figures, one the powerful Wildean persona who booed Princess Margaret off the stage and the other the powerless figure writhing inside the paint. The Wildean Bacon — out and about in London—took delight in flinging open closet doors. His unembarrassed homosexuality helped loosen social constraint and bring a measure of light to those trapped in a difficult period for homosexuals. But he was no less interested in airing out the larger twentieth-century closet, exposing the intractable darkness he found behind the comforting covers of enlightened science, traditional religion, and modern art. The animal remained, as ever, inside the man.

Such an artist might easily have appeared unpleasantly arrogant to his contemporaries. Yet Bacon did not seem that way to friends. They readily forgave him his failings. There was something mysteriously sympathetic about his nature. He did not stand with the bullies, even as he asserted power; and he understood weakness. That living tension between power and powerlessness — a great theme also in modern Western history — would help Bacon become one of the few artists able to take the measure, glancingly, of a dark century.

*

He was born in the first, and died in the last, decade of the century. His sporty parents were part of Anglo-Irish society, then oriented around the great estates outside Dublin, and spent much of their time thinking about horses and hunting. Their second son, Francis, suffered from severe asthma. He was an indoors child allergic to animals who could not ride, fox-hunt, shoot, or do much of anything. He spent less than two years at a public school. He did not formally study art. And he was paralyzingly shy. Since he was not much of a boy, he was not considered very useful, except for talking to girls. As late as 1941, when he was in his early thirties, a woman recalled Bacon as a “rather sallow and podgy” observer looking on from the outside. His older partner at the time, a strong man of the world, made him appear, by contrast, “shambly.”

The dramatic arc of Bacon’s life, which made the art possible, was the creation of Francis Bacon, the commanding figure and “great original” who always knew that he was the most interesting man in the room. It mattered, of course, that he was homosexual; early on he mastered the arts of concealment and display. But no one could have predicted the careless abandon with which he stepped forward in the dreary gray of postwar London. The painter Lucian Freud, who was standing beside Bacon when he booed Princess Margaret, called him the most fearless man he had ever met. Bacon would even let others see the way sexual power and submission played across his body, not bothering to cover the bruises that darkly bloomed on his face and body when rough sex overwhelmed constraint. Wit and laughter, like sex, could elicit truth. So could needling, which might touch off a row that released buried feelings. Wine was a magic elixir, leading to exposures that could be disturbing and amusing. Bacon would have agreed with Winston Churchill that he took from the bottle more than the bottle took from him.

Not surprisingly, he understood the power of appearances, unmasking others while (usually) keeping his own looks in order. In the 1950s, Cecil Beaton wrote:

He appeared extraordinarily healthy and cherubic with apple-shiny cheeks, and the protruding lips were lubricated with an unusual amount of saliva. His hair was bleached by sun and other aids. His figure was incredibly lithe for a person of his age and occupation, wonderfully muscular and solid. I was impressed with his “principal boy” legs, tightly encased in black jeans and high boots. Not a pound of extra flesh anywhere.

Bacon focused on others with unfamiliar intensity, his eyes staring out from a pale and (as he aged) raggedly round moon face. “It was like looking into a light even if you’d only just met,” said one acquaintance. “He could make you feel as if you were the most important person in the world, and then if the light went off you were hardly there.” He was not a giggly or simpering queen. One friend found him sexually ambiguous—a queen with masculine authority. His appetite for life was obvious. He moved on the balls of his feet, always precisely, as if there were some fine edge to negotiate, and he could appear pleasingly Mephistophelian—the devil, as Chesterton said, was a gentleman—with white skin, reddish brown hair, and a trim black leather jacket. (He would take your final bet and join you in the consequences.) It was often necessary to say what should not be said. Bacon reserved for friends or special occasions his free-form queening, when his voice would rise to a high flutey register, every “he” became a “she,” and no saint escaped delirious violation. About late Matisse: “There she was, dear, shitting through her stomach, dear, cutting out these miraculous pieces of blue tissue paper, dear . . .”

Speaking freely led to outsized opinions, heightened by rage at the closeted present. Sometimes Bacon played the part of a twentieth-century prophet, but one who railed against religion. Like any prophet, he was rarely accused of moderation or tolerance. He would emerge from his legendarily messy studio-cave to castigate the comfortable, mortify the flesh, demand a return to first principles. Of what possible interest was an abstract painting or a pleasing landscape — to a prophet — during the dark age foretold by Nietzsche? There was no necessary reason, of course, to heed Bacon. Prophets easily become disagreeable. W. H. Auden, five years older than Bacon, was equally alarmed by the state of the twentieth century and, like Bacon, was a homosexual who cherished the past. In Auden’s view, however, death was not always to be feared. Solace might be found, reconciliations achieved, even a certain lightness attained. Bacon and Auden disliked each other, but room can be found at the inn for both a wise king and a disruptive prophet.

Every morning, before he went out, Bacon flayed the figure. The pope became his best-known subject, though it was the idea of the Crucifixion that most attracted him. The pope symbolized not only religious power but the illusory authority of “fathers” generally in twentieth-century Western society. Bacon questioned all inherited power, even that of Western art. He revered certain masters, and his paintings were steeped in old-masterly touches. But he did not finally want to make an “old master” painting: the loss of that authority, too, must be revealed. Certain of his big triptychs possessed a mystical, impenetrable quality — his version of the Book of Revelations — and also echoed traditional history painting, a stagy genre in Western art in which the artist addressed a “grand” subject that reflected the highest ideals of society. In Bacon’s history painting, there remained the memory of a lost grandeur, a glimpse of “bare, ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”

He became a celebrity, of course, with all that portends in the twentieth century. Around the same age as Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Bacon could sustain comparison with the existential luminaries across the Channel, sharing their themes of alienation, helplessness, and godless despair. And like them he developed a paradoxical pop gravitas. The Bacon profile was: By day he depicts the nightmare of postwar Europe; by night he drinks away the illusions of a failed society. Eventually, he became surrounded by devotees who treated him as a modern saint whose every mark and remark was worth preserving. Bacon sometimes cultivated this attention. Celebrity was a light that, concealing more than it revealed, enabled him to slip in and out of his persona. It certainly did not displace any masks he wanted kept in place. Bacon put off most serious efforts to write about his life. He resisted such efforts partly because he wanted to control his image, but also because he kept secrets, actually one big secret. Something that had little to do with sex, fame, glamour, violence, money, or art.

*

Friends sometimes noticed Bacon’s tic: he would reach for his collar if a situation suddenly became difficult or the right word eluded him. A tug or two gave him a moment’s respite. He might even shoot his cuffs. The tic was poignant less because it revealed a crack in the persona than because it suggested just how difficult it was for him to sustain the performance. He had many debilitating weaknesses. To keep going, he required extensive medical care, including drugs for both his physical problems — asthma and related illnesses — and his unremitting tension. He also required work to steady his day. (As early as 1932, when he was twenty years old, he was “glad” for work “so that the mind could lose its preoccupations.”) And he required alcohol to relieve the pressure of the night. All three — alcohol, work, and drugs — could serve as intoxicants to elevate his mood, but they also paradoxically made it possible to imagine a more conventional life. It was Bacon’s secret that he was not just a radical master of the twentieth-century stage who exulted in the dark arts. He was simultaneously an Englishman suffused with longing for the ordinary patterns of joy and solace denied him as a child and young man.

Like many people, for example, Bacon had a “love of his life” — Peter Lacy — who made him giddy with desire and whom he could never quite leave. Lacy has usually been assigned a devilish supporting role in Bacon’s life, described as a dashing fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain and a sexual monster in the bedroom. In fact, Lacy was never a fighter pilot, and he passionately loved Bacon. He became violent when he drank, but Bacon also intentionally provoked him, finding the eruption of his demon-riddled soul inexpressibly moving. After Lacy’s death, Bacon, while an impossible partner—at once promiscuous, needy, and quarrelsome — continued to seek regular long-term relationships. He dutifully performed the traditional masculine roles — refracted through his homosexuality — of son, lover, and father. He kept up with his family. He frequently helped out with money and small kindnesses. He had lifelong friends. He wrote innumerable letters of apology the morning after. When his friend Roald Dahl wrote to him to ask what he would choose for his last meal, Dahl — a gourmet — probably expected “Champagne and oysters.” The answer was: “Two lightly boiled very fresh eggs and some bread and butter.” After his death, his old friend David Sylvester wrote:

Since he died, I’ve not thought about him as a painter. I’ve only thought about the qualities which have long made me feel he was probably the greatest man I’ve known, and certainly the grandest. His honesty with himself and about himself; his constant sense of the tragic and the comic; his appetite for pleasure; his fastidiousness; his generosity, not only with money—that was easy—but with his time; above all, I think, his courage. He had faults which could be maddening, such as being waspish and bigoted and fairly disloyal, as well as indiscreet. But he was also kind and forgiving and unspoiled by success and never rude unintentionally.

Bacon possessed the ordinary soulful feelings, however much he scoffed at religion, once referring without irony to “the great sea” within everyone. His brushwork sometimes suggested, in his quieter pictures, a gentle painter of melancholy and loss. His friends sensed his homespun loneliness; the painter R. B. Kitaj was surprised that he always seemed free for dinner. Like many people without much education or training, he felt insecure about work in conventional as well as existential ways, professing to like almost none of his own paintings. He constantly revised or destroyed them until, pressed by a deadline or the need for money, he was forced to let some go. Too many were mediocre, of which he was well aware.

He could appear as bewildered as anyone else by the changing attitudes of the twentieth century. He detested the word “gay,” and he was not pleased that so many homosexuals wanted to join the mainstream. Wasn’t being queer problem enough without adding the problems faced by “the norms”? The strangest trick the twentieth century played upon Bacon was to turn him into a traditional authority. Once a commanding figure who attacked convention, he found himself the admired subject of scholarly disquisitions. The iconoclast developed, ironically, into an “icon.” Even as a star in the postmodern era, however, he preferred to take the tube to Soho. He queued for the bus.

The grand note in Bacon came mainly from ancient culture. He relished the vibrato of tragedy and the moment of catharsis, which “unlocked the valves of feeling.” He was especially drawn to the related ritual of blood sacrifice, of which the Crucifixion was an expression. Wasn’t the sacrifice of the modern figure, on the dark altar of twentieth-century power, worthy of the same elevation? His art retained the pungent air of ceremony and incense: a chair could almost be a bloodstained altar, a bare bulb a torch, a dais an ancient stage. But the sacrifice could transcend deadened ritual only if the spilled blood mattered. It must belong not only to the fatted calfs of Western power and presumption but also to people going about their lives. It was finally Bacon’s feeling for the ordinary that gave his invocation of the human sacrifice in the twentieth century an Everyman authority. The flesh under the knife was also his own. He shuddered with the meat.

Ch. 1:
Boy at the Window

In the beginning was Ireland, but not the Ireland of legend. Francis Bacon was Anglo-Irish, “a race inside a race,” as the writer Elizabeth Bowen put it, “a sort of race carved out of two races.” To know Francis Bacon, his friend Caroline Blackwood said, you must first understand that he was not an Englishman—and, equally, not an Irishman. He was instead that hothouse stem the Anglo-Irishman, part of an English ruling class that was both privileged and alienated, set between two worlds and shadowed by each. Another friend, Anne Dunn, thought Bacon made important use of the “cover” of being from a place apart. “The Irish believe that you don’t ever have to explain yourself. Because you’re Irish you don’t have to say more than that. I think Francis put that on like a robe and it gave him protection. Because he was not entirely English he could do what he wanted.” Religion represented the defining line between the two peoples in Ireland, of course: the Protestant English who belonged to the Church of Ireland (as the Anglican Church was called) and the Catholic “other.” There would be many powerful rooms in the art of Francis Bacon, but never a settled sense of place.

His parents were proud newcomers to this Anglo-Irish world, having moved to Ireland only in the early 1900s. Their first homes were leased. They were, as Dunn said, “honorary Anglo-Irish.” The Bacons were an old English family—dotted with military men and the occasional title — that over the centuries exported many young Bacons into the Empire. It therefore seemed natural to move to Ireland, then still regarded as a colony. During the eighteenth century, which many Anglo-Irish called “the Great Century,” the landed gentry constructed Georgian manors throughout the countryside. In Dublin, the wealthy built squares of Georgian town houses near the city’s historic Trinity College. Until 1801, when England dissolved the Irish parliament and incorporated it into its own, Dublin had been the flourishing political capital of Ireland. It remained in Bacon’s day the social capital of Anglo-Irish culture. The Kildare Street Club — founded in 1782 and well-known for whist and claret — was the symbolic heart of the Anglo-Irish world. The club served the so-called big houses in the countryside, keeping kennels so that members might bring their dogs to keep them company on the dull trip to town. In the counties around Dublin, called “the Pale,” were numerous estates where life focused on balls, fox hunting, tennis parties, and the Church of Ireland. Many of the manor houses were owned by the descendants of early English settlers. The Bacons easily fit into the Pale. They loved horses and fox hunting. They had money, style, and name enough.

Major A. E. M. Bacon, the father of Francis Bacon, set great store by precedence and appearance. He liked good breeding in horses, dogs, and children. He named his firstborn Harley, the patronymic of his grandmother, Lady Charlotte Harley, who was the family heroine and the treasured jewel of the Major’s genealogical line. (The Harley men were Earls of Oxford and Earl Mortimer.) The family china contained a dark-blue-and-gold H, a reminder of his connection. His second son — the artist — was named after another illustrious ancestor, the philosopher Francis Bacon.